This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The following abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined as follows:
API application program interface
MAC medium access control
WLAN wireless local area network
Wi-Fi is a branded standard for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A Wi-Fi device, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point (or hotspot) has a range of about 20 meters (65 feet) indoors and a greater range outdoors. Multiple overlapping access points can cover large areas. “Wi-Fi” is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, and the term is a simple brand name for the IEEE 802.11 standard.
A MAC address functions as an identity of a device and is presented to external devices. In at least some conventional mobile devices (e.g., mobile phones) it can be necessary to restart the WiFi modem (modulator/demodulator) of the device in order to change the MAC address of the device. This can be due to, for example, the fact that a conventional WiFi modem may change MAC address only at boot time. Rebooting the modem can require several seconds. As a result a maximum rate of MAC address changes can be limited to a period of time on the order of about ten seconds. One benefit of this restriction is that an attacker (a person with malicious intent) cannot use the mobile device to masquerade as more than about six different nodes per minute.